Colonisation is probably the most dreaded term in the modern world. No country wants to suffer that torture again. Countries design their Foreign, economic and military strategies in such a way that their citizens do not end up taking diktat from people of other countries. Seemingly, it also looks as if colonists have left their colonial agenda and are looking to cooperate with the countries which they had exploited for centuries. But, is that true? The answer is no. Erstwhile colonisers seem to have found a new tool. It’s the Big-Tech companies.
If you watch it closely, it won’t take you more than 15 seconds to realise that the idea of a nation-state in non-western world is slowly dissipating into oblivion. Most countries can no longer boast of being proud of their culture. The way people of these countries revere almighty, the way they eat, the way they speak, the way they dress up, seem to be more in alignment with western way of thinking rather than their own.
To blame it on one ‘ism’ will be a massive understatement. People you watch around seem to be diving into the Capitalist utopia of consumerism, but you also need to know how they are doing it. The people are using the language of Communism to justify their resource grabbing attempt in a capitalist economy.
For example, Communism preaches the removal of borders. Now, if you analyse the ideas of the Big Tech bosses like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai etc, you would realise that their businesses are also built on the same principle, albeit in a different manner. They either break the regulatory norms of a country or simply get it changed through lobbying to make their business flourish.
All these companies want a constant flow of funds in their bourses. For them, a country’s culture is just a tool to manipulate in order to increase their profiteering motive. Constant advertisements to push cultural boundaries are glaring examples of this trick. Big Tech’s dominance on information dissemination makes it doubly difficult for an average person to understand what’s going under the carpet. To understand their colonial agenda, it would be apt to draw the parallel between how they operate and how the colonialists (as we know them) operated during their time.
When the colonialists conquered respective countries, they realized that through careful maneuvering, they could milk them for hundreds of years. But, it was difficult to control the local population as any time they could be up in arms with nationalistic fervour guiding their wild spirits. So, the Western countries choose a new method. They decided to make their subjects (citizens of the country) active partners in their agenda.
The technological development which western countries had, succeeded in providing them with an edge. They started to transfer these developments to their colonies. However, contrary to expectation, their developed infrastructures were controlled by colonialists, while subjects of these colonies could only become daily wage workers.
Britishers took the transport network (roads, railways) to the hinterland of India. To make it possible, British ensured that the rights of indigenous tribes which held local land were snatched from them. These people who did not have any documented claims on their lands, except the faith through word of mouth could not claim that the land belonged to them. Effectively, the locals were employed as labourers on their own land.
Now, extrapolate it to the whole world. Wherever western countries established their factories, ports, military bases or any other infrastructure, they uprooted locals and made them slaves. They did it by micromanaging the aristocratic class of the area. In return for pecuniary gains, the aristocracy provided them with easier access to the local market. But colonials held no allegiance to anything other than money. After engulfing the working class of the local area, they went for the aristocracy and then for monarchy, slowly but steadily, kingdoms were destroyed, giving birth to a totally new kind of world order in which resource collection (money) was the ultimate prerogative.
The world order which the industrial revolution brought was no different from today’s. Just like East India company has spread itself to the extremes of India. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter have also occupied every smartphone’s data. Now, Indians no longer look for Indian style Kurta Pyjamas. Instead, they see what kind of Kurta has been donned by Jeff Bezos, an American in his interview with Shahrukh Khan and then copy his style. In short, they lost their sense of dressing and ended up copying Jeff’s style.
Just like the old colonists used their puppet kings to sustain their cause, the new tech oligarchs are also establishing their favourable governments, which are mostly liberal in their tilt. Most of the employees hired by these big tech bosses have a liberal bent of mind, which means they will scuttle the voices of anyone having remote closeness to conservative points of view. The big tech felt no shame in uprooting Donald Trump, a sitting president of the United States, from their platforms, just because he challenged the existing order.
These companies have engineered regime changes at a rate unforeseen in human history. Moreover, they have hijacked the narrative space around these changers. Apparently, the Arab Spring is considered as the pinnacle of Social Media revolution, but no one knows whether it was an organised minority which engineered this chaos, or whether the majority of people were actually unhappy with them. However, crux of the matter is that the Big Tech was credited for these ‘democratic regime changes’, which translated into increasing the consumer base and more and more countries adopted them to increase the penetration of democracy. Alas! They didn’t knew that they were promoting colonialism in the garb of democracy.
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